I followed this story a bit as it happened. This seems like a good retrospective summary. It is a tragedy that we can't have access to at least some of those books. What's needed is a major change in international copyright law, but that would be a very difficult thing to achieve while legislators have almost no interest in the matter, other than occasionally extending copyright when asked to do so by Disney and co.<p>Obviously you can't change international copyright law by means of a civil action between a US-based "ad slinger" (as theregister.co.uk calls it) and some private writers' association.
I personally wouldn't call it a tragedy. No way google did this to "serve humanity", they see a way to make money on this. 10-20 years down this road, and the only way to access this knownledge would be to subscribe to some service.